COMICS: Original Speed Racer Manga

Speed Racer: Mach Go Go Go
The Complete Original Manga
By Tatsuo Yoshida
Black & white (with a few color pages)
Two volumes, 620 pp (Hardcover)
Published by DMP Platinum, $39.95

Digital Manga has released a handsome hardbound edition of Speed Racer’s original comic book adventures, just in time to catch any remaining interest generated by the recent live-action movie. Based on reviews, the movie will probably be relegated to the bargain bin by the end of the year, but fans of classic Japanese comic strips will be happy that, at the very least, it resulted in this collection’s release.

THE COMIC
The basics of Speed Racer will be familiar to anyone who watched the cartoon series as a kid. Speed Racer, the son of world-renowned mechanic Pops Racer, confronts gangsters, foreign agents and disgruntled rivals while driving his Mach 5 car in a series of increasingly-improbable road races (in one race, his brakes are intentionally disabled to make the contest even, because his opponent’s car has been similarly damaged!).

Although we see a few of the gizmos that characterized the Mach 5 in the cartoon (the bird robot, the sealed-off cockpit, the under-chassis jacks), the stories are more concerned with action than with showing off all the hardware available. In typical Japanese style, many of the stories are about resolving your differences through non-violent means, rather than just punching everyone in sight, but, that said, there’s still plenty of action, both hand-to-hand (Speed is an accomplished martial artist) and on the racetrack.

The stories are obviously written for kids, but as an adult, I still found them fast-moving and entertaining. In one particularly bizarre sequence that would never pass muster for an American “kids’ comic” today, the annoying young sidekick Spritle is actually strapped to an altar and threatened with a razor-sharp swinging blade, a la The Pit and the Pendulum!

The real prize, though, for adults, is the artwork. Yoshida draws in a clean, fine-line style that’s detailed and dynamic. These volumes are a treat for anyone who appreciates the graphic design elements in comic strips, and each panel is bursting with 60s pop-art style, from the legendary design of the Mach 5 itself down to Speed’s argyle socks (seen in close-up every time he steps on the gas).

In terms of the layout of individual panels, and the “pacing” from panel-to-panel, the artwork has a cinematic visual style that’s pretty far beyond most mainstream American comics of the time, and is reminiscent (to me) of the cutting-edge work that Jim Steranko was producing in America around the same time (1967).

Finally, to my untrained eye, it appears that the last story in the collection (“Race to Fire Island”) was drawn by a different artist, although no other artist is credited besides Yoshida (presumably it was drawn by one of his assistants).

THE COLLECTION
Digital Manga has put together a truly impressive package here. The books are well-made hardcovers with sewn bindings (a practice I wish DC and Marvel would adopt), printed from right-to-left (and “back” to “front”) in the traditional Japanese style. The two volumes (one featuring Speed on the cover, the other featuring Racer X) come packaged in a durable slipcover decorated with a gorgeous wrap-around illustration of the Mach 5. Underneath the dust jackets, the actual book covers have been printed in a beautiful minimalist style (again, with Speed on Volume 1 and Racer X on Volume 2) that perfectly complements the slipcover.

The strips are printed on high-quality matte-finish paper and the artwork is (as much as possible) crisply reproduced. The original artwork was, presumably, long-gone by the time they assembled this collection, and several of the early stories have a rougher look, as if mastered from a higher-generation copy, but the visual brilliance of the art is always apparent, and on the cleaner-looking stories (mostly in the second volume), the image quality is fantastic.

My only reservation about this release concerns a very peculiar decision that was made to print translations of each sound effect next to the original Japanese rendition wherever they appear. At best, this clutters up the panels by introducing two visual elements where the original strip had only one; at worst, it destroys the careful composition of some of the more dynamic panels, and in some cases, it even obscures a noticeable portion of the original art.

That seems like a rather large imposition to make on the author's original work, and it doesn't help that the English sound effects are added in a generic "krazy komics" typeface that doesn't fit in at all with the stylized, dynamic style used for the Japanese characters (which are often drawn in perspective to give them some "depth" within the image). It seems to me that most readers would consider it more valuable to see the original, unaltered artwork than to know whether each car's engine is going “VROOOM” or “VARRROOOM” at any particular moment.

Still, overall, I have to give this collection an enthusiastically positive rating. Digital Manga has done a great job of presenting the original strips that most American have probably never seen, but which inspired the whole Speed Racer pop culture phenomenon for the next 40 years. For collectors who like to “get back to the roots”, these volumes definitely deserve a place on your shelves, alongside the increasing number of other high-quality reprint series (e.g. Complete Peanuts, Complete Popeye, etc.) that have made the early 21^st Century a real “Golden Age” for classic comic reprints.